15 comments:

THAT'S a VERY good question!I'm still kind of interested in what prompted them to make a tv-show around Spain featuring a vegetarian (Spain, on the road again). She was very nice but going around Spain WITHOUT eating ham?!

Oh for goodness sake! I just recently watched the On the Road through Spain show. Totally unimpressed with all the yuck faces she made at food, especially in front of people serving her. Um, even if the item (jamon or lobster) totally grossed her out, the appropriate response is "no thank you." That's called good acting and good manners. :)

Actually, they didn't "make a tv-show around Spain featuring a vegetarian", they made a tv-show around around Spain featuring Batali, Bitman, Paltrow, and Bassols (a Spanish actress): http://www.spainontheroadagain.com/That doesn't answer the original question, of course. :-)

SO, what's the problem here. it seems to me that if cooking is so cool that even well-known actresses want to be seen doing it THAT IS A GOOD THING !isn't that what ruhlman and others have been trying to promote; cooking your own is as easy and convenient as going to KFC.

Bill, I don't see any real problem with any of this and of course I know why she is doing cooking demos. She knows that the public is interested in her life and she's capitalizing on that. Really, all I was trying to do in the post was to highlight the fact that the market for cooking culture is so big that it has become okay for people from other fields to represent themselves as cooks. What I don't understand very well at all is why cooking media is so popular. I think it's because people are biologically hard wired to cook but they would rather not actually do it so they satisfy their desire vicariously. But really, i don't know.

That's something that happens in almost all sectors of the 'food enthusiast" market. From "Real Simple" to "Cake Boss" there's loads of processed food advertising. I think there are lots of reasons for it.

Advertisers know that people who view food media are worth marketing to because they have already identified themselves as being seriously interested in being concerned about how they eat.

Also they understand that even though someone might be tuning in to learn to how to cook something from scratch, they still might be too insecure or distracted to pull it off and ripe to settle for a quick fix.